Oracle Blog

Random NetBeans Stuff

Wednesday Aug 13, 2008

In the coming weeks, a free on-line NetBeans Platform Training Course will be made available. It will be based on Tim's excellent "PovRay" series, which is currently severely out of date and has been causing a lot of questions for a while, even though those who work their way through the problems tend to end up with the result they were looking for in the first place. In that context, his tutorial will be removed from the web because it will be part of the course. The most interesting part of his tutorial, on a technical NetBeans Platform level, is the material relating to the creation of NetBeans project types. Those taking the course won't necessarily be interested in that, but will probably be taking the course to gain a general understanding of how to work with the NetBeans Platform.

But what about those who're interested specifically in creating new NetBeans project types? They first need to ask themselves whether they really need a new project type because since 6.1 it is possible to extend existing project types, which should be seen as the preferred approach, as outlined in the NetBeans Project Type Extension Module Tutorial. However, what if you STILL need to create a new project type? For these special cases, a sample is now available:

It will create a new project type. The project type will treat any folder as a NetBeans project if it has a subfolder called "texts". The content of the "texts" folder will be displayed in the Projects window. The project will have some of the typical project-level commands at its disposal:

So, if in the coming weeks the PovRay tutorial suddenly disappears, now you know why. At that point, you can either take the free on-line NetBeans Platform Training Course or (and in the period where it isn't available yet) you can simply download the sample and adapt it to your own needs.

The sample was created in NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta, so you need at least that release if you need to work with it.

About

Geertjan Wielenga (@geertjanw) is a Principal Product Manager in the Oracle Developer Tools group living & working in Amsterdam. He is a Java technology enthusiast, evangelist, trainer, speaker, and writer. He blogs here daily.

The focus of this blog is mostly on NetBeans (a development tool primarily for Java programmers), with an occasional reference to NetBeans, and sometimes diverging to topics relating to NetBeans. And then there are days when NetBeans is mentioned, just for a change.